ACCRA, (Xinhua) --To ensure unhindered enforcement of its
Climate Change policy, government of Ghana seeks to
transform these policies into legally Mandatory
Instruments (laws), a senior public official has said.

In an
interview with Xinhua after the one-day Stakeholder
Engagement for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Readiness
and Closure here on Friday, Peter Dery, Head of Climate
Change and Sustainable Development Unit of the Ministry
of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation
explained that until these regulations were turned into
laws it would be difficult to enforce them.

“The issue
has to do with enforcement. What we are beginning to do
now is to turn the policy into legally mandatory
instruments like laws. So we are looking at for example
revising the Building Code to ensure that some of the
things in the policy reflect in the new Building
Regulation,” Dery disclosed.

Furthermore
he said the government was looking at revising some of
the existing laws including the Legislative Instrument
(LI) which regulates environmental permits to compel
people coming for environmental permits to meet certain
conditions.

“And equally
in the energy sector some laws are being revised to
ensure that we put in all these things,” he added.

According to
Dery, the West African cocoa, gold and oil exporter had
undergone the GCF Readiness program and had by that been
able to build a number of capacities and strengthened a
number of institutions including those that will undergo
the accreditation process to become national
implementing entities for the GCF.

“There are a
number of activities that have been ongoing in terms of
climate change. The first is ensuring that we have
policy coherence, a policy document that tells us where
we are going. So with this, any institution that seeks
to help Ghana, by picking up that document will
understand what the country wants to do,” he added,
indicating that the next action is to mobilize funding
to be able to implement climate change programs.

Adwoa
Fraikue, Head of Natural Resource, Environmental and
climate change at the Ministry of Finance, said since
Ghana recognized its vulnerabilities from the impact of
climate change it had been working hard to mitigate the
impact even before the GCF was instituted.

“We are
aware of rainfall destroying our agriculture; rainfall
having negative impact on our generation of power; we
are aware of flooding affecting our cities and villages;
sea erosion washing away our coastal communities; and
the destruction of infrastructure,” she maintained.

The
destruction of food crop and non food crop farms by
floods as well as the inability to generate the needed
power for industrial use, according to Fraikue were all
economic realities that climate change had imposed on
the country .

With the
two-year Readiness program completed, she was optimistic
that the country was ready to access funds from the GCF
to implement some of the adaptation and mitigation
programs it had drawn up.

“We can
still access the funds through the multilateral entities
like United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP)) and
the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). We have
about three projects that we have sent concept notes on
to the Fund.

“One is on
Renewable Energy; one is REDD+(Reducing Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation) being run by the
Forestry Commission; and the other one is Resilient
Agriculture. In all if they get approved then 310
million U.S. dollars will be made available to the
country.”